Cordant Group becomes UK’s largest social enterprise

23rd of November 2017
Cordant Group becomes UK’s largest social enterprise

Leading UK recruitment and services business Cordant Group, which includes Cordant Cleaning, has announced its new status as a social enterprise.

Framed around a five-year plan, the group will reinvest the majority of its profits in due course into social programmes across education, employment, and healthcare, pledging to touch and improve thousands of lives, one community at a time.

The business has annual revenues of €947 million and employs 125,000 people in schools, hospitals, care homes, security and specialist roles such as engineering. Guy Pakenham is managing director of Cordant Cleaning, which turns over €73 million and employs 3,500 staff nationwide.

He told ECJ: “Cordant is a family-owned business and the family decided that what they wanted to do is become a social enterprise. They want to take the excess profits out of the business and use them for the good of society rather than the shareholders.”

The company will focus on helping particular projects he added. “For most of us it’s business as usual as we are still working hard to make profits – it’s what we now do with those profits that’s now changing.”

Already Cordant has capped all annual shareholder dividends at approximately €282,000 per shareholder family per annum, which in today’s terms equates to €3.4 million. All executive salaries have been capped at 20 times that of the lowest paid worker, and the company has agreed to be independently audited, using recognised Social Impact measurements.

Profits will be reinvested into key initiatives including:

• A teacher programme being developed by international education expert Richard
Gerver to examine the link between the classroom and life/work preparation

• IT platforms offered at zero cost for the healthcare sector, enabling hospital trusts to offer shifts directly to doctors and nurses, saving the NHS millions of euros

• Partnerships with key clients focusing on upskilling and training for the temporary workforce to drive productivity but deliver deeper satisfaction

• The creation of a profit share scheme for staff

• Ongoing investment in technology to better connect pupils to apprenticeships, workers to jobs, and patients to doctors and carers.

www.cordantgroup.com

 

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